Battling Over the Enlightenment

|Peter Boettke|

I recently walked into a room of graduate students with a copy of Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation (very thin essay) and Jonathan Israel's Democratic Enlightenment (over 1000 pages), and pronounced to the students that despite the modern age and the insights that can be found in works such as Cowen's, as scholars we still should aspire to write tomes like Israel's. Weighty subjects require weighty books. Political economy and social philosophy, economic and intellectual history, comparative institutional analysis of economic and political systems is all weighty stuff.

I am not sure how my visual aid worked among the students. The professional rewards in economics are decidely not in the direction of producing works such as Israel's --- our profession is not a book-culture, but a journal-culture. And while economics books can still sell well, they tend to be shorter and more policy focused than say an unwieldy subject such as the Enlightenment. Still those who do tackle such a subject, such as Deirdre McCloskey or even more directly Joel Mokyr, do tend to write weighty tomes. McCloskey's work on the bourgeoisie is a multi-volume project, Mokyr's The Enlightened Economy is over 500 pages. But neither McCloskey nor Mokyr are fresh out of graduate school, but established veterans of the business, and leading practitioners of economic history (which remains in part of book-culture). Still they established themselves professionally by learning the art of the skillfully crafted research paper that is published in the established scientific outlets. We all must do this to have a career as a professional economist, and the better you are at doing that, the more successful your career will be.

Still, I was trying to make a broader point to graduate students interested in following in the intellectual footsteps of Mises, Hayek, Buchanan, etc. There is, I will quickly admit, nothing worse in the social sciences and humanities than badly done "big-think", even poorly executed "little-think" at least tends to be in a form that you can dismiss quickly. But bad "big-think" goes on and on and on. So the the length of a book isn't at the core of the message I was sending. It is instead the aspiration of such overarching narratives, and what it takes to produce such a narrative, that I wanted to the students to see as the challenge worth pursuing.

My use of the Democratic Enlightenment also was not an endorsement of Israel's work per se. Though his earlier work on the Dutch Republic, The Dutch Republic (another 1000+ page tome) is outstanding and should be read by all those political economists who are interested in the general narrative that Barry Weingast puts forth in his classic JLEO paper from 1995, "The Economic Role of Political Institutions" and his idea of market-perserving federalism since the Dutch Republic sort of starts the entire issue off of incentive compatible economic growth and development. But that is a topic for another day.

In the most recent issue of the London Review of Books, Margaret Jacobs -- a professor at UCLA and the author of the wonderful book, Strangers Nowhere in the World, which discusses the rise of cosmopolitan beliefs in the work of Kant and others -- reviews Israel's A Revolution of the Mind. Her review is appropriately respectful, yet harshly critical at a fundamental level.

In looking closely at her review, I can see why my students might be hesitant to follow my advice to jump into the murky waters of grand narratives. "Big-Think" has a lot of intellectual traps that if you fall into, you can get hopelessly lost. Better to 'stick to your knitting' with economic analysis. I agree with them, but for 1% of them, they should break the mold and dare to think big thoughts and tackle ambitious projects. At GMU these students have the opportunity to study closely the genius works of Adam Smith, David Hume, J. S. MIll, Ludwig von Mises, Frank Knight, F. A. Hayek, and James Buchanan. A subset in our PhD program encourages them to study these works and to contribute to that on-going convesation that exists in those works, and which in part is at the core of the intellectual history of western civilization. The economic way of thinking can in fact prove to be essential in tackling the quesitons that a Jonathan Israel or a Margaret Jacobs is asking; ultimately an adjudicator between competing claims about the operation of political and economic institutions and their interaction.

James Buchanan always told us in class to "dare to be different". That advice is as wise today as it was 25+ years ago when I first heard it. Tackle big questions, write big books, and cross disciplinary boundaries without a care in the world. There may indeed by high returns for pithiness, as Tyler has told me on many ocassions, but there is also great pleasure in striving to tackle the biggest questions one can ask in a serious and professionally responsible way. And we economists have a great advantage in such thinking --- we have economic theory as a tool to guide us. Lets put that tool to use to explain our past, our present, and our possible futures.

Comments

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In my experience, you can get someone to look at your painting before they will look at your poem. They will look at your poem before they will look at your short story/essay. They will look at your essay before they look at your book.

I suspect many more people have read my essays than have read my book.

Yet, I still want to write books. Why? In the social sciences, there's just not enough pages to say what needs to be said in an essay. The topic is too complex.

Except...I'm sure there are better passages...and a better method of categorization. If you get a chance, I'd sure love to see your list of the "best" passages that describe the most important libertarian economic concepts.

I kinda do the same thing with music. I force myself to choose my favorite song from my favorite artist. It's really not easy but it's the best format for a sampler CD that you can share with friends.

I am also a fan of big think books. However, for young aspiring academics, the hard truth is that, at least in economics, "books do not count" for tenure and promotion. It is articles, preferably in more prestigious journals, that do.

Bottom line is that one should get tenure, wherever. Then one can pursue the major book project(s). I am annoyed that "books do not count," but note that at the higher level they still do. I am talkiing being remembered over a longer period of time and also getting Nobel Prizes. When Elinor Ostrom got her prize there were a bunch of nauseating bozos on ejmr who denounced it, whining that she had not published in any of the "top four" journals. Of course, they gave it for her _Governing the Commons_, which has been cited more often the entire opi of many econ Nobel Prize winners.

One of the reasons that thinkers such as, say, Adam Smith, Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich A. Hayek stand out and are "lasting" in their relevance is precisely their "wider-view" of things.

That is another way of saying that they were "interdisciplinary" in their knowledge, outlook, and analysis. "Enlightenment" thinkers.

Partly this is the case because of an earlier era's conception of a "well-rounded" education that included reading and understanding the "great books" and the grand historical narratives that placed "the world" in a larger context.

And which, then, served as the context for one's own thinking in one's own field or discipline.

I can only say this. My "generation" of "Austrians" (the 1960s and 1970s) took it for granted that one was expected to master "all" the literature of both "Austrian" and "mainstream" economics.

Plus . . . to be knowledgeable about history (intellectual, political, social, economic), informed about philosophy, political philosophy and political science, and an amount of sociology (how could you be an "Austrian" if you had not read Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Raymond Aron, Talcott Parsons, Alfred Schutz, etc.?)

Each of us (Don Lavoie, Jack High, Mario Rizzo, Jerry O'Driscoll, Sudha Shenoy, Joe Salerno, Roger Garrison, . . .) had to make our "marginal" decisions as to the allocation of our, respective, scarce time in these various knowledge directions.

But each of us -- without central command or direction -- took upon ourselves to try to emulate the earlier scholars who had inspired us and were our role models for becoming "thinkers."

I wonder if the current generation of those interested and/or pursuing "Austrian" economics are motivated in the same way. And acting upon it to the same degree.

It is a demanding intellectual road to follow, but the reward as a thinker is in both the journey and the destination.

I don't think Pete was really on about books or their length except as a sub-theme. The point is that we should "dare to be different," and we should "think big." I agree.

As Pete was saying, I think, big-think is hard; it is easy to veer into nonsense or poly-syllabic vacuity. So dare and think, but also think about strategies to keep it real. Maybe I'm reading in, but I think that's the main issue in Pete's post.

IMHO, it helps to translate your big think into something empirical or otherwise relatively finite, close, technical, precise. Okay, so you think the economy is shaped like a 12-dimensional hyper-rhombus? Maybe, but what does that have to do with the spread of the law merchant or consequences of the 19th-century Irish cottier system for the labor market in northern England? Maybe that's what Pete was hinting at when he notes that the monster tomes are usually written relatively late in one's career.

Of course, another virtue of waiting, particularly if one manages to keep on studying and learning widely rather than just narrowing down into some tiny specialty, is that one knows more over time and is better able to write a serious book when one has acquired a bit more knowledge and all that. I did not publish my first book until 14 years after I started teaching at JMU.

Following on Professor Ebeling's point, I was delighted that in both "Socialism" and "Human Action" von Mises used a few Greek words, printed in the Greek alphabet and untranslated. Those were the days.

Not bigness for its sake, but somethings require booklength treatment. Especially if one is daring to be different.

AT UCLA, we were required to master all major schools, and then sort out the truth. The truth could not be reduced to a simple model. Except, as Alchian always reminded us, demand curves slope downwards.

BTW, it has now been pretty clearly established that while they are exceptionally rare, there are (or have been) goods that have at least portions of their demand curves that slope upwards, Chinese rice in poor rural areas awhile ago being perhaps the most cldearly established such case.

600 Page monster full of oodles of equations and applied "economism". Much prefer books to the journal culture; feel it is too restrictive, especially for "commercializing" theory. Friedman had it about right, but where is economics' Michio Kaku?